Before you write a message to a public, you have to find out what that public wants. Most business owners skip this step, because it produces nothing you can show, and it is the step that decides whether everything else works.
The source behind the booklet describes a whole procedure, from identifying the publics to sending the message, and gives it a name: the System. The booklet sets it out step by step. Here we look at one link in it, the one that vanishes fastest from a schedule.
The System in brief
The general idea is simple. At the start you know who your publics are, and in most businesses there are several separate ones. At the end each public receives the message and the offer that fit it.
In the middle sits a step that is easy to miss. The source puts it this way: “then they must survey and examine the responses of each different type.”
The booklet points out that this is exactly the step most people skip. It looks like a delay, and it is what makes it possible to write a separate message for each public.
Why this step gets skipped
The reason is plain. This step produces nothing you can show. No ad comes out of it, no post and no file. All that comes out is information, so it is easy to feel that it only holds up the real work.
In practice people jump from identifying straight to writing. They identify the publics and write each one a message based on what they think it wants. On paper that looks tidy: several publics, several messages. Every one of those messages is aimed at a guess.
Suppose an owner does exactly that. He identifies two publics and writes each its own message, based on what he imagines. He ends up with two highly accurate messages, accurate to what he thought.
Now suppose a shop owner who runs all the steps, finding out included, on just two publics. She finishes within a fortnight, and that is enough to get started.
What the step decides
According to the booklet, this step decides whether the other steps work at all. Without it you write a very accurate message to the person you imagine.
Suppose a consultant skips it and writes a message about saving time. His public worries mainly about mistakes, and time concerns it far less. The message is well worded and speaks to a worry the public does not have.
After ten conversations with customers, the same consultant changes one central word in the message and doubles his enquiries. Between the two versions, one thing changed: what he knew when he wrote.
Finding out costs less than the mistake
The booklet ties all this back to money. Before you pay for advertising, you spend a couple of hours finding out, and those hours cost far less than a campaign fired in the wrong direction.
The number that explains why appears at the very start of the booklet. According to the source, the wrong public lies behind roughly 99% of the errors in this area. Finding out is where you discover that the public or the message does not fit, before you have paid for that discovery with a whole campaign.
Suppose a fitter asks ten customers what made them choose him, and eight of them say the same thing. He had not mentioned it anywhere in his advertising. Without those conversations he would have gone on paying for a message about something else.
A step with no deliverable gets deleted first
There is a scheduling side to this as well. The booklet warns that a step with no visible deliverable is the first thing to drop out of a schedule, so give it a date of its own.
The chapter also makes a quiet demand that concerns the last step. According to the source, in a well-run organisation every public is catalogued and tagged on a list. For someone who works alone, that means your contact list records which public each contact belongs to.
Without that, you know who your publics are and have no way to reach each one separately. Suppose a fitter adds one column to his customer spreadsheet, for the type of customer. He can suddenly send a message to fifty people it concerns, instead of five hundred.
The booklet itself calls this the most boring work in it, and says it takes an hour.
The booklet has a diagram of the System for this chapter, two exercises in doing it, and self-check questions. Later it deals with the finding out itself: how to word a question, how to count the answers, and what to do with what comes out.
Before you write to a public, find out what it wants. It is the step that looks like a delay, and it lets everything else work.